Monday, November 28, 2011

He died today. His rather gauche movies sometimes hit the spot. I kind of hated Gothic for making Shelley be such a nutter. But Tommy was pretty intense. Unbelievably my father was music director for Lisztomania (1975), which meant that he had to teach Roger Daltrey how to mime playing the harp. Predictably Daltrey made a rather desultory comment about reading music (namely his inability to do so), which did not impress him.

That was a very good way to start the day, I feel. The passion people brought to Occupy was palpable and it made sitting extremely easy. All one has to do in circumstances like that is bring one's passion and then let it be, coexistent with others. A truly creative time. People were awake, heartfelt and extremely intelligent.

I'm going to paste here something I wrote for the nonviolence conference on meditation, because it may ring some bells with people. The line of thinking is based on my argument that OOO objects (everything) are fundamentally inconsistent, because of a rift between essence and appearance. This has political implications:

[H]ow does meditation look on the ground, in practice, “where the rubber meets the road” to use the awful bureaucratic phrase? One is allowing one's thoughts to exist, without trying to delete them. Thus one is allowing oneself to be inconsistent: the mind is making some effort towards mindfulness, yet there are also thoughts occurring that distract the mind. In higher forms of meditation, the practice has less effort. One is simply allowing whatever happens to happen, no matter what the thought is. Some kind of commitment is required, a commitment not to adjust what is happening. This non-adjusting allows beings to resound in all their contradictory plenitude. Since all phenomena radiate from the nature of mind or from Atman (and so forth, depending on which school of thought one is following), all is purified in advance within the larger space of freedom. Purified here means left in its natural state, which is open and vivid. There thus arises what in Mahamudra and Dzogchen is called non-meditation. This non-meditation is different from not meditating, and also different from meditating. It is simply coexisting with what is. Meditation simply is nonviolence, which means allowing the rift between essence and appearance to persist.

In meditation then, one is both p and not-p at the same time. One is a living contradiction, the contradiction that defines living as such. One coexists in the simplest possible way, namely with oneself. Narcissism thus means self-relating, which means other-relating. Since being myself means never directly being myself, my existence is coexistence, even when hypothetically I am totally on my own. Meditation is thus nonviolent, not simply because it means you are trying to make yourself be gentle, but because you are allowing yourself to exist in your inconsistency. In a group of meditators, this nonviolent coexistence becomes vivid. The person on your left might be plotting to take over the Universe. But what on Earth is he going to do about it in that moment? He is meditating!

Meditation means allowing at least one thing to be inconsistent. Allowing the rift between essence and appearance to persist without causing it to close and thus for essence to evaporate. Nonviolence. Humans must get used to the depth of nonviolence in their being. The Greek term for this getting-used-to is mathēsis, which is fully thought not simply as calculation, but as acclimatization, as growing accustomed to the truth of things. The Tibetan for this getting-used-to is gom, which is the term for meditation. In Buddhism there are three stages of learning: hearing, contemplating, and meditating. Hearing is thorough attunement to the dharma. Contemplating is more deeply digesting it into one's being. Meditating is enacting it, living it, embodying it. This embodiment just is nonviolence, a nonviolence that attunes the layers of a human being—cultural forms, attitudes, psychological states, biological equilibriums, physical being, mind, heart, flesh, bone—to the fundamental inconsistency of reality.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

By Tim Simmons. Very interesting idea. Huge billboards with photos of textures of nonhuman spaces. I wonder how much they are a cry of the heart in a heartless world—haunting reminders of the yonder of Nature within artifice. Maybe I'm reading them wrong. And I've only just started to see them. HT Sam Scott (@bigsagacity).

Time: 9 a.m.
Event: Occupy Sanity: Creating Enlightened
Society one Breath at a Time
By: Professor Timothy Morton, Professor of
Literature and the Environment in the
Department of English
Place: Sacred Space: (Blue Dome on the Quad)

Time: 1 p.m.
Event: Part 1: Three Theories of Power, Three
Forms of Struggle: Marx, Fanon,
Foucault (Parts 2 & 3 will be held on
Tues & Wed)
By: Professor Nathan Brown, Assistant
Professor in the Department of English
Place: Sacred Space: (Blue Dome on the Quad)

Time: 2 p.m.
Event: Active AND Privileged: Examining
Unintentional and Unconscious
Dominance Within the Protest
By: Dr. Laurie Lippin, Lecturer in the
Department of Human and Community
Development
Place: Sacred Space: (Blue Dome on the Quad)

Time: 6 p.m.
Event: What happened to the economy to
create the lack of funding at UC? And
what do we need to do?
www.quantiger.wordpress.com
By: Brian Hanley, Ph.D. Butterfly Science
Place: East Quad Workshop Space

It existed about 2.9 billion years ago. It was gigantic, filling the planet's oceans. (Haha, we were just talking about Solaris).

It split into three: bacteria, archaea and more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants. (In your face underminers! This is a huge entity that split, not smaller objects that assembled!)

5–11% of proteins are common to all lifeforms. Therefore they are in LUCA. These proteins are living fossils of LUCA, which preexist the machinery that now makes them. We have proteins first made by the coding apparatus of LUCA. This is like saying that there are words that preexist all the people who used them. If that isn't spooky I don't know what is. “Language speaks” (Heidegger).

"Structure is known to be conserved when sequences aren't," agrees Anthony Poole of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, though he cautions that two very similar structures could conceivably have evolved independently after LUCA. (New Scientist)

LUCA had leaky isoprenoid membranes and was multicellular, in order to cope with the rather haphazard way its metabolism worked. It could digest nitrates and carbon. It probably shared DNA and enzymes between cells (the leakiness was exploited).

All lifeforms have in their cells organelles called acidocalcisomes. LUCA contained acidocalcisomes.

LUCA may not have used DNA. It used RNA instead because RNA can store information and control chemical reactions.

When each individual cell could produce all it needed, LUCA was not required. LUCA became extinct, broke apart into three branches. The ability to process what you need within a bounded container is called death drive. I suggest that the split of LUCA into the three branches of life (see the diagram above) had to do with this increased inner consistency. LUCA died out because beings became more efficient.

What a masterpiece of speculative biology. I'm going to think about this.

My wife wonders whether it's really Kris or a planet simulacrum at end. Could be that the ocean doesn't want to give Kris up & so recreates him in his longing. If end-Kris is real in sense that neutrino-Hari is, then we shift from psychological readings of Kris's end and towards the ocean's desires. The inhuman, the split Big O, what have you in an oop sense, the universe's desires, altered by its contact w/ us, but also itself, going on w/out us.” (Twitter forces one to abbreviate, which can be good.)

My pennyworth was my favorite Lacan quotation: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.” The disturbing ambiguity of the end is precisely that way. We are inside the ocean-being's fantasies. As the camera pans back, we see a little world of human meaning in a gigantic ocean of non-humanness, as the synthesizer dissonance absorbs Bach into its wider sonic spectrum. Love it.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

As fate would have it, we're both finishing our essays for New Literary History tonight...Graham's is synoptic, mine is a probe. That's just how it happened. They complement each other excellently. Thanks Rita Felski for asking us to do this. My one is called “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” I'll let Graham tell you what his is. It made me smile.

I find this interesting, and it makes me smile, especially my inner OOOer. From a description of the black bloc activities in Seattle on November 30, 1999:

When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that
surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcize that set of
violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost
everything around us. By "destroying" private property, we convert its
limited
exchange value into an expanded use value.

A storefront window becomes a vent
to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet (at
least until the police decide to tear-gas a nearby road blockade). A
newspaper
box becomes a tool for creating such vents or a small blockade for the
reclamation of public space or an object to improve one's vantage point by
standing on it. A dumpster becomes an obstruction to a phalanx of rioting
cops
and a source of heat and light. A building facade becomes a message board to
record brainstorm ideas for a better world.

After N30, many people will never see a shop window or a hammer the same way
again. The potential uses of an entire cityscape have increased a
thousand-fold.

I would like to see some corroboration for these. I'm not going to post their times for plastic or polystyrene because I reckon they're off. Obviously it depends what happens to these objects, how they are processed or not, and so on.

Friday, November 25, 2011

It's been too long since Margulis's death for me to write this without some kind of sense of guilt. The Occupy happenings have been preoccupying me.

I remember when I first heard about Margulis, it must have been in the early 80s when I was making my first discoveries about molecular biology and evolution. The term symbiosis is a very very evocative one.

An essay version of Margulis's work on bacteria was perhaps the first piece of speculative realism I ever read, in a collection of essays on Gaia, coming out of the Lindisfarne conferences. I was stunned by the clear logic of her argument. Here was someone thinking a world unimaginably ancient, a world in which things we take for granted—oxygen, in the main—didn't exist as they do now.

The fact that animal cells contain mitochondria, which have their own DNA, because they are hiding from a cataclysm their ancestors brought about, called oxygen: this was and is profound, wild stuff.

Lynn Margulis was the first to convince me that there are already aliens, some of them inside me.

It's a sign of the times, perhaps, the Occupy times, that Žižek can come this close to my favorite combination of flavors: Buddhism, anarchism and Taoism. Check it out:

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism:
to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts
and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas
Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism,
Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.).

As John Clark points out to me (HT to him), it should without doubt be Daoism versus Legalism or Confucianism—but never mind. Then Žižek goes and slightly spoils it:

The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings
which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and
the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality
(for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the
originality of Western thought becomes clear...

Right? I mean, no, we're not all equal “only” in nirvana, within Buddhist praxis. For a kickoff, we all have unconditioned karma: we're not totally stuck in our caste or class. (This was the whole point of the social origin of Buddhism.) And nirvana and samsara aren't separate. I see no inherent obstacle in Buddhism to adhering to the egalitarian spirit in this world.

Reagan died in 2008 when Lehmann tanked. But his zombies lurch on, and we must stop them. My colleague Mike Ziser writes the following very eloquent contextualization of the kairos that the pepper spray incident has opened up:

As various studies have
revealed, the rise of poor quality for-profit colleges and technical schools that
encourage students to finance their rising tuition through publicly subsidized loans has
led to a large transfer of public funds to politically
connected private "entrepreducational" corporations. One can think of it as
a giant money-laundering scheme--one in which citizens desperate for a route to improved
economic conditions are compelled to launder funds pilfered from the public treasury.

There is no serious attempt to address the 40%
default rate on government loans to students at for-profit colleges because, from the
perspective of the elites making the loans and receiving the funds, it doesn't matter
whether the cost is borne by a low-wage graduate or is socialized to the 99% as a whole.
As Nathan noted, this model of university education as a "profit-center" is now
well entrenched in ostensibly "public" schools. The education bubble and its
inevitable collapse will be a disaster of historic proportions for the entire educational
system, but even medium-term consequences are of course of no concern to those who will
already have fed on this public system and moved on to the next target.

What a genius invention! Is any one person responsible for this phrase? It's used in Occupy to gather people's hearing.

It's phatic: that is it's a communication that draws attention to its physical dimension. Not to a content. Or to an addressee. Or to the addresser. Or a metalanguage. Or to itself. In other words it's part of ecological poetics (I go through that in Ecology without Nature).

It also sums up the object-oriented politics of Occupy. It's not "about" something, it directly IS that something. Here, there is, givenness, Es gibt, il y a, coexistence. Hale, holy, hello, hi.

"Hi" is a word originally used to summon hunting dogs. "Hello" was exapted from hunting to be the word we say to one another on phones. It has to do with the history of phones.

"Mic check" is playing with this technological history but in a subversive way, directly. I like that it isn't "hey" or "hi" or some other hailing of a subordinate animal in a hunt. Or for that matter a Heil to a great leader.

It's a check, a test. Without a subject addressing an object. Far more purely phatic. Without aggression. Fucking genius.

Vince Carducci wrote me again this morning about that fantastic "Garden of the Gods" near Detroit. (See my previous.)

He summed up the last few days: the coming out of the 99% and the subsequent "exposure of the police state."

Yes. For something to happen it has to happen twice, right? Riot cops and SWAT teams met the striking students in Mrak hall (the admin building) in 2009. It was pretty shocking. And again Friday, and of course in Berkeley.

These guys are bankrolled by the so-called War on Terror. They are fragments of a nightmare from which it is necessary to struggle awake.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

From the student occupations at the New School, to the political tracts circulating through the University of California, to Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee and other groups, there is a new political posture
today, a new political bloc with an acute black-box profile.

The new mantra is: we have no demands. We don’t want political representation. We don’t want collective bargaining. We don’t want a seat at the table. We want to leave be, to leave being. We have no demands.

The power behind the ‘no demands’ posture is precisely that it makes no claim about power at all. Instead it seeks to upend the power circuit entirely via political nonparticipation. It would be wrong to cast this aside using the typical epithets of cynicism or nihilism, or even to explain it away using the language of state power versus terrorism, which we should remember is the language of Lenin just as much as it is the language of Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, and all the rest, for the key to this new political stance is in its subtractivism vis-à-vis the dimensions of being.

Precisely. I've been saying this for a while in a slightly different key. Earlier in the essay Galloway elaborates a differences between black boxes and functional entities: the closed and open laptop is his more-than-analogy. This is the difference between what I've been calling constructivist and object-oriented approaches in art. We could use a lot more of the latter in ecological politics.

Galloway's understanding of this is a little intuitive and working with the (I would argue) somewhat broken tools of constructivism, to try to understand these black boxes. But. I was arguing at the nonviolence conference last week in Florida that merely existing (not bare life) was the aim of the Occupy movements. Galloway ends:

To end, we shall not say that there is a new blackness. We shall not ratify the rise of the obscure and the fall of the transparent. But do not decry the reverse either. Simply withdraw from the decision to ask the question. Instead ask: what is this eternity? What is this black box – this black bloc – that fills the world with husks and hulls and camouflage and crime? Is it our enemy, or are we on the side of it? Is this just a new kind of nihilism? Not at all, it is the purest form of love.

One of my Ph.D. students is now living in Nebraska, and he reports from there (while finishing his excellent dissertation on the perils of agriculture) that many are siding with the police and the admin at UC Davis. Their logic goes something like “They deserved it, they were breaking the law.”

It is a quite general feature of theories that try to characterize the limits of our cognitive abilities to think, describe, grasp, that they end up implying that they themselves cannot be thought, described, or grasped. Yet it would appear that they can be thought, described, and grasped. Otherwise, what on earth is the theory doing?

...

The contradictions at the limits of thought have a general and bipartite structure. The first part is an argument to the effect that a certain view, usually about the nature of the limit in question, transcends that limit (cannot be conceived, described, etc.). This is Transcendence. The other is an argument to the effect that the view is within the limit—Closure. Often, this argument is a practical one, based on the fact that Closure is demonstrated in the very act of theorizing about the limits. At any rate, together, the pair describe a structure that can conveniently be called an inclosure: a
totality, Ω and an object, o, such that o both is and is not in Ω.

On closer analysis, inclosures can be found to have a more detailed structure. At its simplest, the structure is as follows. The inclosure comes with an operator, δ, which, when applied to any suitable subset of Ω, gives another object that is in Ω (that is, one that is not in the subset in question, but is in Ω). Thus, for example, if we are talking about sets of ordinals, δ might apply to give us the least ordinal not in the set. If we are talking about a set of entities that have been thought about, δ might give us an entity of which we have not yet thought. The contradiction at the limit arises when δ is applied to the totality Ω itself. For then the application of δ gives an object that is both within and without Ω: the least ordinal greater than all ordinals, or the unthought object.

OR, in OOO-ese: objects appear, and thus they are within Ω, but they also withdraw, and so they are not. The appearance of a (withdrawn) object is precisely Priest's δ.

Inclosure is now my favorite withdrawal substitute. Along with secret.

This was such a powerful comment by Jairus (editor of The Contemporary Condition and human extraordinaire) on the video of the Chancellor walking surrounded by silent Occupiers, that I thought I'd put it here:

It reminded me of the final scene from the Birds where Tippy Hedron is
walked in a daze to the car while as a viewer you can't help but
scrutinize every bird looking for the one that will start the frenzy. Of
course the frenzy never comes. I think this was a political event
Hitchcock would have been proud of. Depriving the Chancellor of her
fantasy of the violent activists was the truly horrifying act.

Like its predecessors, excellence, interdisciplinarity, and sustainability, impact is now a word of which administrators are overly fond. Like these other words, impact appears to be a transparent gel of indeterminate chemistry. The gel sits on my bathroom shelf and every time I need to impress someone, I tousle my hair with impact. The gel may also be used as a poor substitute for coarse cut marmalade though. There's nothing quite like reading the morning news on my iPad with my teeth coated with a sticky layer of impact. Moving further back in my mouth, I recall how my wisdom teeth did it to my jawbone.

In short, the bureaucratic use of impact is just another way to say: “We have no idea what you're doing, and you must keep doing it, only better. To wit, you are hereby required to use impact at least three times in your grant proposal.”

Excellence was postmodern styling mousse, sharply perfumed yet curiously flavorless and disconcertingly soft when placed between meringues. Excellence was individualistic and iridescent. Pimp my excellence. Interdisciplinarity was far more collective, like a brown paper parcel that consisted of smaller brown paper parcels ad infinitum. Interdisciplinarity was Californian: it had something to do with groups of people coming together to do something or other. At a stretch it could mean turning 180 degrees and reading a book on the shelf opposite the one you normally look at, or in those far off days, surfing the “internet.”

Sustainability was where things got a little bit ecological. You are smoking a cigarette, but is that sustainable? You are staring horrified into the mirror, seeing only a tattered clown who never truly loved, but how do you sustain this vision? Sustainability was, if I recall, where the rubber met the road. “Where the rubber meets the road” was itself where the rubber made significant contact with the road, or should we now say impact.

Yes we should. Impact is what a football does when it really hurts you. Impact is that fist coming down on the table in the unforgettable Government ad of the 1980s: “Think BIKE!” Impact doesn't care about sustainability, or excellence. Interdisciplinarity is for wimps. Knowledge should be like Doctor Johnson's boot the moment it made contact with the stone, refuting Berkeley with a loud click. Impact is the first punk bureaucratic term and we should cherish its arrival. I don't think.

an MIT-led team of researchers has now established that the end-Permian
extinction was extremely rapid, triggering massive die-outs both in the
oceans and on land in less than 20,000 years — the blink of an eye in
geologic time. The researchers also found that this time period
coincides with a massive buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide...

Please email Matthew Smith at Yale's Philosophy Department if you
wish to co-sign this excellent letter. He is looking for a publication
venue. His email: matthew.noah.smith@yale.edu. A link to the letter is here. You may wish to email the link to the letter to your university adminstrators.
Key points:

We therefore call on chancellors and presidents of universities and
colleges throughout the United States to declare publicly that their
campuses are Safe Protest Zones, where nonviolent, public political
dissent and protest will be protected by university police and
will never be attacked by the university police.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to commit publicly to
making their campuses safe locations for peaceful public assembly.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to institute immediately
policies that reflect these commitments, and to instruct their police
and security forces that they must abide by these policies.

The text of the letter follows:

Open Letter to Chancellors and Presidents of American Universities and Colleges
From Your Faculty
We have witnessed, over the past two months, police departments using
significant amounts of force against individuals peacefully
participating in the Occupy movement. But during the week of November
13 – November 19, there was an astonishing escalation of the violence
used by municipal police departments against non-violent protesters.
We hoped that even as politicians and municipal police violently
responded to the Occupy movement, college and university campuses would
remain safe locations for non-violent political dissent. But that has
not been the case. In fact, universities and colleges appear to be
using the same tactics in their interactions with unarmed, non-violent
members of the university community as we have seen municipal police use
against the broader Occupy movement.
In particular, we are concerned with the actions by police associated
with two University of California campuses. At UC Berkeley, police
beat faculty and students who were peacefully attempting to establish an
Occupy camp on Sproul Plaza. At UC Davis, police casually
pepper sprayed protesting students who were peacefully sitting with
their arms linked. The message sent by university officials is clear: if
you engage in non-violent political protest on the university campus,
you run the risk of being assaulted by university police.

We condemn this and any deployment of violence by university
officials against members of the university community who are
non-violently expressing their political views.

We condemn university officials using violence or the threat of
violence in order to limit political dissent to the narrow confines of
print and university-sanctioned events.

We condemn university officials using violence and the threat of
violence to prevent members of the university community from peacefully
assembling.

For more than three generations, American university and college
campuses have been crucial locations in which inspiring and important
political activity has occurred. From the founding of SNCC at Shaw
University and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960’s, to
the divestment movements across American college campuses in the 1980s,
to the establishment of student labor alliances in the 1990’s, American
college campuses have pulsed with hopeful and positive forms of dissent
and visions of alternatives. This amazing tradition is being threatened
by the use of violence by university officials against their own
students and faculty who are acting within this tradition.

We therefore call on chancellors and presidents of universities and
colleges throughout the United States to declare publicly that their
campuses are Safe Protest Zones, where nonviolent, public political
dissent and protest will be protected by university police and
will never be attacked by the university police.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to commit publicly to
making their campuses safe locations for peaceful public assembly.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to institute immediately
policies that reflect these commitments, and to instruct their police
and security forces that they must abide by these policies.

We believe that this action is necessary for the protection of one of
the principal virtues of our higher education system, namely that it is
an environment that cultivates an active and engaged political
imagination. We call on the leaders of America’s universities and
colleges to stand with us.

The UCD Campus Police have failed to investigate all kinds of race based violence, and have sometimes aided in it.

We received the following in our inboxes from the Chancellor recently:

“On
Sunday, November 13, during the UC system-wide Student of
Color Conference, an unknown individual vandalized one of
the Veterans Day yellow ribbons tied around a tree on the
quad, writing on it, "USE ME AS A NOOSE." “

At
the exact same time the police were pepper-spraying
non-black student protesters, just across the quad in the MU
concerned members of the black UC Davis community and allies
were in a meeting with administrators, staff, and student
media about the hostile reporting practices of the
California Aggie paper toward the black community at UC
Davis. Two specific concerns were:

1)the
“Jungle Fever” column published by an Asian student about
her newfound attraction to black men and love of hip hop
music

2)the
Aggies’ failure to report specific incidents
of antiblack hate crimes this year, which include (but are
not limited to) the display of a napkin fashioned to
replicate a Klu Klux Klan hood in the African American
themed floor in Campbell Hall.

Just
the night before (Thursday) an even larger group of
students, staff, faculty, and administrators met to raise
concerns not just about these specific attempts to
intimidate black students, but also the fact that the UC
Davis police has both failed to investigate antiblack hate
crimes committed on campus in the past 7 years and/or
actively disappeared whatever police reports had been
filed on these incidents.

Additional
issues between UCD police and black students:

1)UCD
police summoned by white staff to haul away a black
graduate student trying to enter a building during
business hours because the staff member did not believe
this person was actually a student

2)Guns
drawn by UCD police on a separate black student also
trying to enter a building. The UCD student paper was
directed by staff to not report this issue. The incident
escalated into a lawsuit and an out-of-court settlement

The
way incidents of antiblack uncivility are treated at UCD is
glaringly unbalanced in comparison to the tokenizing fervor
raised over the vandalism of the LGBT Resource Center,
swastikas scrawled on the doors of Jewish students, and now
this pepper-spray incident of uncivility.

"I went to the MU yesterday in order to meet a colleague for coffee. As I arrived, I saw what was occurring and walked up from behind. Cops were surrounding the sitting protestors, arms linked, around the tents. I walked up to an isolated cop on the outskirts of the crowd and asked her to explain what was happening: a tear gas or pepper spray gun (whatever) was pointed at my body and she refused to speak to me. Immediately, I was part of the illegal protest (in a virtual, unclear state of violence) by merely walking on to the quad in the proximity of a cop behind everyone. If I wanted to know where I had a right to stand, she would not have told me. Moments later, the cops broke through the circle of protestors--some were in our graduate program, I might add, and fortunately were unharmed--and destroyed the tents."

A disturbing wonderful song by Robert Wyatt and Ivor Cutler. It seems very appropriate for a week during which the police have acted the way they acted towards our students, and towards my friends Bob Hass and Celeste Langan. For sitting on the grass. Lawns have ever been a strange place of republican dreams and nightmares.

Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.
Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.

And we shall talk.
And while we talk I’ll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me.
While we talk I’ll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me.

Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.
Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.

And do not mind if I thump you when I’m talking to you.
Do not mind if I thump you when I’m talking to you.
I’ve something important to say.

Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.
Go and sit upon the grass
and I shall come and sit beside you.

And when I’m gone you can feel the lumps upon your head.
And think about what I said.
And think about what I said.

Etymology:
Irregularly < Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French occuper to take possession of, seize (1306), to fill a certain space (1314), to employ (c1360),
to hold possession of (late 14th cent.), to inhabit (1530), to exercise
(an employment) (1530), to fill time (1530), also reflexive, to busy
oneself with (c1330) < classical Latin occupāre to
seize (by force), take possession of, get hold of, to take up, fill,
occupy (time or space), to employ, invest (money) < ob-ob-prefix + the same stem as capere to take, seize (see capturen.). Compare Italian occupare (a1294), Catalan ocupar (13th cent.), Portuguese ocupar (14th cent.), Spanish ocupar (1438).The ending of the English word has not been satisfactorily explained; compare Anglo-Norman occupier (late 14th cent. or earlier), which may however show the influence of the English word. Compare occupiern., which occurs earliest at the same date; it is unlikely that the -i- in the verb and the noun originates from the suffix -iersuffix.

Throughout
the 17th and most of the 18th cent., there seems to have been a general
tendency to avoid this word, probably as a result of use of the word in
sense 8. N.E.D.
(1902
) notes s.v.: ‘the disuse of this verb in the 17th and most of the
18th c. is notable. Against 194 quots. for 16th c., we have for 17th
only 8, outside the Bible of 1611 (where it occurs 10 times), and for
18th c. only 10, all of its last 33 years. The verb occurs only twice
(equivocally) in Shakes., is entirely absent from the Concordances to
Milton and Pope, is not used by Gray; all Johnson's quots., except 2,
are from the Bible of 1611. It was again freely used by Cowper (13
instances in Concordance). This avoidance appears to have been due to
its vulgar employment in sense 8’; and compares the following two
instances:

1600
ShakespeareHenry IV, Pt. 2ii. iv. 142
A captaine? Gods light these villaines wil make the word as odious
as the word occupy, which was an excellent good worde before it was il
sorted.

a1637
B. JonsonDe Stylo in Discov.
(1640)
112
Many, out of their owne obscene Apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words; as occupie, nature, and the like.

1819
J. BurnessPlay 310
Gif he his trade would occupy, He might himself by that supply.

1909
Westm. Gaz. 9 July 4/2
The flycatchers and the warblers of several kinds, occupying their business by the water's edge.

†b.intr. To be busy or employed (in some capacity); to exercise one's craft or function; to practise; to do business, to work. Obs.

1417
in M. Sellers York Memorandum Bk.
(1912)
I. I.182
If any man come fra other cites or tounes, and will occupy here in
this cite in girdelercrafte als a maister, he sall pay at his first
settyng up of his shoppe x s.

?1435
in C. L. Kingsford Chrons. London
(1905)
56
Moneday was the Octaues off Seint Edward‥the which day the kyng wolde nat ocupye.

a1500
(1425)
Metrical Life St. Robert of Knaresborough 1183
Graunt me grace‥to reul this place And sway to gouernn to my degre
Þat I, all yff I simple be, Occupyes als presidentt By grace þat God
here has me sentt.

1546
Stirling Archæol. Soc.
(1905–6)
57
Elspet Tailȝor, the relict of Alexander Tailȝor, to occupy the fredome of that craft.

1560
J. Daus tr. J. Sleidane Commentaries f. ccclxxx,
You who occupie the chiefest places amongest the states of the Empire.

1602
W. WarnerEpitome Hist. Eng. in Albions Eng.
(rev. ed.)
355
The Pictes‥then occupying those parts which we now call the middle Marches, betwixt the English & Scots.

1755
B. FranklinObserv. conc. Increase Mankind 2 in W. Clarke Observ. French,
In countries full settled‥all Lands being occupied and improved to
the Heighth; those who cannot get Land, must Labour for others that have
it.

1641
Termes de la Ley 107b,
Demaines‥be all the parts of any Manor which be not in the hands of
freeholders of estate or inheritance, though they be occupied by
Copiholders, Lessees for yeeres or for life, as well as tenant at will.

1742
H. FieldingJoseph Andrews I. ii. xiv. 267
He occupied a small piece of Land of his own, besides which he rented a considerable deal more.

1767
W. BlackstoneComm. Laws Eng. II. i. 7
By constantly occupying the same individual spot, the fruits of the earth were consumed.

1598
J. FlorioWorlde of Wordes,
Trentuno,‥a punishment inflicted by ruffianly fellowes
uppon raskalie whores in Italy, who‥cause them to be occupide one and
thirtie times by one and thirtie seuerall base raskalie companions.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

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“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci